Month: June 2011

The Fat Banker notes from a cheese platter somewhere in NYC: He was one of my all time favs, and in my PhD days, long before I even observed he had graced the covers of Said’s “orientalism”, a print of his “Pigmallion and Galeta” used to adorn my hallway – until I got rich enough to purchase the original. if you see what I meAn.

A true Tailorite Soof, since his sojourn down to “Egypt” (geddit) whence this orientalist tafsir derives …

And round about them shall go youths never altering in age; when you see them you will think them to be scattered pearls. (76:19)

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Foucault, power and Asia (again)Statement: “Imagination exists as a function of colonial power”.

The Tailorite Complex responds

Quite so, quite so: the term contains within it a whole trace that is inextricably Logocentric (which is basically the Eurocentric powerhouse if you are postcolonial, or the Phallocentric regime if you’re a feminist).

But of course — so are the terms “function”, “existence” and “power” — these are also functions of that powerhouse, functions whose operation is a means to power, weaponry of suppression, of oppression.

Now, the general post-structural response is to unpack these terms, query them, deconstruct and de-center them, expose their situation, contextualized within the historical ebb and flow (fields) of power. The postcolonial response is identical, but to expose the whiteness of the power at play (and the browness of what is being supressed).

For example, we could unpack the term “imagination” and trace its usage back to the European enlightenment — in which “imagination” privileges a kind of private, secular space of thought that ultimately is used to enslave the black man. Those who do not imagine as we do are the barbarians: all kinds of ways of saying this — we teach them what creativity/art/culture is — or they do not “imagine”, they “feel” — or perhaps they only “imagine”, they do not have a cultural demarcation between imagination and science/rationality, they are wild imaginers, they are imagination. The list’s endless (even includes government and privately funded “Islamic arts” movements in modern times, in western cities like London). And in all these senses it is a means to control, to define caste systems, to enslave.

Observe also that post-structural feminism proceeeds along an identical Foucaultian response –but the emphasis is on how the power play runs to castrate women. For example, creativity/imagination always end up in objectification of woman, never of subjecthood — imagination has always been a tool of violent pornography, since the beginnings of European culture.

The Tailorite response acknowledges the Foucaultian gambit. But it goes deeper, it has to, because there’s something deeper going on.

The Tailor Complex believed and followed that all that poststructural stuff for exactly 7 years, studied it, lived it, breathed it, recited it daily. Until the end of 2002, when we had an encounter with an entity known to the Muslims as “Allah”.

The repercussion of this (a small repercussion within a much wider personal impact) was that we realised Foucault is mere defense, an evasive maneuver that is only completed by Tailorism. There’s an intrinsic materialist slavery involved in his analysis.

Know that Foucault himself is the creation of Asia. And, solving the feminist’s problems as well as the postcolonial, an Asian Woman created Foucault — using her Imagination. She has many names — one of which is Hajar. Her Imagination occurs in the Gnostic Scriptures as “Eve’s Shadow”.

Know that attack (of the Mind) is better than defense (of matter).

Foucault received his revelations (that continue to rock the academy) after chemical adventures in the desert of the academy. We received ours after a Hajaric flight into a deeper, underlying desert: one in which we saw that Hajar engendered Foucault by means of her shadow.

Foucault exists as a function of Hajaric power.

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The story of Tamar is notable for its theosexual novelty: a tantra of benevolent deception that yields inception through a Truly innovative drama (innovation = role play = changing of clothes, from one garment to another garment). Her Holiness derives Its power from her primordially cosmetic allure.

Three brief observations (each in succession falling like a dead husband):

Tamar’s three husbands, the sons of Judah, perish because they can’t take her in, they are unable to grasp her in totality, they are unable to read her.

When Tamar takes on the garment of Sacred Prostitute (returning in baqa from widow’s garment), she is to seduce Judah, she does so at Petach Einayim, the entrance toEinayim.

She put off her widow’s garments, and put on a veil, wrapping herself up, and sat at the entrance to Enaim. (Genesis 38:14)

This is the name of a village but also has the meaning of opening of the eyes. Her Truth appears (in irony) as a (veiled) lie to the man: but is a Feminine miracle of harvest by means of opening of the eyes. The eyes of Who (Mi/Who always means the Divine Mother, the Womb of Creation)? The eyes of the Face of God. It is their opening in Grace that provides her with children, the agency of Judah coincides, transmits this, like a cut-and-paste job.

Judah sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites: in a very specific way, his sons’ evil, their perishing and Tamar’s entrapment of him, taking the trope of his Judaic seed into her immanent womb — this story is the balancing (offset/debt repayment) of that sin.

Let those who read me, read. Let those who do not read, send a scapegoat in lieu of that reading: let them send one down to Petach Einayim.

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Tailorite Devotional Exercise: clear your mind, open the Sahih Bukhari on a random page and write down what is immediately apparent.

Narrated Imran bin Husain: I went to the Prophet and tied my she-camel at the gate. The people of Bani Tamim came to the Prophet who said “O Bani Tamim! Accept the good tidings.”

They said twice, “You have given us the good tidings, now give us something.”

Then some Yemenites came to him and he said, “Accept the good tidings, O people of Yemen, for Bani Tamim refused them.”

They said, “We accept it, O Allah’s Apostle! We have come to ask you about this matter.” He said, “First of all, there was nothing but Allah, and (then He created His Throne). His throne was over the water, and He wrote everything in the Book and created the Heavens and the Earth.”

Then a man shouted, “O Ibn Husain! Your she-camel has gone away!” So, I went away and could not see the she-camel because of the mirage. By Allah, I wished I had left that she-camel. (Sahih Bukhari, “Beginning of Creation”, Volume 4, Book 54, Number 414)

Prophecy is a Light that appears to bend and divide as it passes through the prisms of our perception (though its Photonic Reality is the constant by which theories of relativity may be drawn up/inseminated).

All tribes are prisms of matter, porous membranes. The Bani Tamim are a northern prism that (like all prisms/membranes) draws Prophecy’s good tidings through them. But they deny Light’s passage (news) by demanding that Prophecy be material . In a sense, the Bani Tamim demand that Prophecy be a physical man, to be really real, to demand his situation/capture within their northern membrane of matter. The Bani Tamim’s demand is tantamount to demanding that Prophecy be useful , of some value (social, political, financial, moral, familial — all forms of materialisation/capture) besides its inherent Photonic Beauty.

They are a prism that would be a prison. But the nature of signs is that they have doors that permit entry and exit, conjunction and disjunction, assemblage and disassembly. And so the Nur passes through, but never materialises. The Nur captivates with Beauty, the Nur is True Capture, but Truth is never captured.

The Yemenis are a southern (right handed) prism, a membrane who is at peace with its membrane-nature: and therefore can be called a people of Love. This is because acceptance of no-compulsion in Deen = acceptance of passage of Love. And this is tantamount to acceptance of our material nature as Love’s impossible creation: Love has Created matter (in fundamental contradiction to Love’s Unity) as an overflow/excess of Love that there might be receptivity, that there might be passage, that there might be Nur of Good News, passing through slavery, extending back up in reciprocal planetary growth and harvest. The Yemenis understand this, accept this, their impossible situation of matter in relation to Prophecy’s passage, they accept their membrane impossibility and are consequently receptive to the passage.

And the passage itself then takes the form of Creation’s Impossibility recited through Creation’s Impossible Hearing. Their shema: the southern people hear and affirm: there is nothing but Allah, then the throne (whose stature extends in primordial excess, the vibratory-yet-still-face-to-face aspect of excess known as fatherhood into maternal waters). This vibratory excess forms the perfect Kitab, the Book of Truth. But that Book becomes impossibly fragmented so as to be delivered through passage (the ultimate excess) across a fragmented multiplicity of immanent planes, each comprising of atoms of porous impossibilities, what are known as Ayat of Allah. And so there is Heavens (Nur/inception) and Earth (the membrane of matter/reception).

They said, “We accept it, O Allah’s Apostle! We have come to ask you about this matter.” He said, “First of all, there was nothing but Allah, and (then He created His Throne). His throne was over the water, and He wrote everything in the Book and created the Heavens and the Earth.”

And the She-Camel? This is the internalisation of this water. It is the comic irony of the hadith: the hadith, my commentary is a fantasy itself. Tenuous, she’s accompanying me, as I sit here and listen to Prophecy, turning his face from this northern folk to this southern folk. I tethered her at the gate of the hadith, and so I grasping the point, understanding, hearing in shema. But she’s also my distraction, when I look directly for her (look but don’t listen), she disappears — she’s a fantasy after all, a fantasy of the process, an internalisation that carries only by virtue of her fantasy.

And it appears I’ve become a rich man, bewildered by what just came and went … my needle still in hand …

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What’s your position within the Islamic scholars’ debates on female circumcision?

Well, for a start, I can no longer call myself a Muslim or a scholar these days, so I couldn’t position myself in relation to those debates. (They form part of an indigenous Islamic tradition in relation to which we external agents must always exercise care, lest we generalize to the point of oppression: “They mutilate their daughters so let’s bomb them” where, in fact, their traditions have already internally negotiated a position toward the physical act that affirms its permissibility from Allah but curtails itself from physically putting it into practice, yadda yadda yadda.)

But I do have an interest in circumcision.

“Circumcision” for me (as I read it in Torah and hadeeth) is a Judaic trope for “rendering righteous” a sign’s potential to communicate/connect with other signs.

All signs (big and small) can interconnect to produce meaning. Meaning can be good or evil, literate or dumb. For instance, take the sign of metal and connect it to other signs in a certain, promiscuous, unguarded fashion, and you get evil in the form of a gun (the ultimate literalisation of the trope of matter). Then take metal in a different connection to other signs (what we have called a Rainbow Connection) and you’ll find it transformed into silver, into your Wealth, an inheritance of reading, of signage becoming autonomous, self-aware, reflective of its ultimate unique status as a word within a larger (unique) Love song.

The latter, desirable connection is enabled only when the phallic/inceptive/transmissive part of your language is curtailed from temptation to “mate” with all signs in non-transmissive fashion (anally or with arbitrary matter) and — instead — when that part of your language is circumcized, directed to exist in chain/silsilah to Muhammed. Then you see things with his eyes, recite your signs with his circumcised lip, with his voice you hear yourself reflecting yourself in surahs of existence, a Qur’an appearing to you (the Cube’s doors accessed).

That’s male circumcision, curtailment.

And female curtailment is permitted: to grant its permission is tantamount to a tafsir on the Female Prophetesses (Sara, Esther for example).

An old woman from Kufa, the grandmother of ‘Ali ibn Ghurab, reported that Umm al-Muhajir said, “I was captured with some girls from Rome. ‘Uthman offered us Islam, but only myself and one other girl accepted Islam. ‘Uthman said, ‘Go and circumcise them and purify them.'” (Sahih Bukhari)

Sufficeth to say, in the Tailorite myth: all the Sahaba understood what “circumcision” signified and no “physical” practice of circumcision (of men or women) actually took place. All these acts were linguistic (and self-reflexively so, our myth itself circumcized by these entities, our myth is the Byzantine slave girl.)

The directed nature of circumcision applies equally (or, to be precise, direction becomes transcendently immanentized/transcendent transmission is transmitted by immanentization) to the process of Becoming Prophetess:

Umm ‘Alqama related that when the nieces of ‘A’isha’s brother were circumcised, ‘A’isha was asked, “Shall we call someone to amuse them?” “Yes,” she replied. ‘Adi was sent for and he came to them. ‘A’isha passed by the room and saw him singing and shaking his head in rapture and he had a large head of hair. ‘Uff!’ she exclaimed, ‘A shaytan! Get him out! Get him out!'” (Sahih Bukhari)

But a Prophetess is a special thing: she’s an transcendent virus running through the immanent … er … folds of the hijab of matter. The phallus is a phantom: it’s Inception encoded within plateau of Reception. The Feminine phallus was not understood by Freud, it was his final frontier, a dominion that only the true Tailorist dares approach. The secret of the clitoris then? To speak of the phallus — in fact, any kind of cosmology — is always an act of clitoral stimulation. And it’s gotta be done right, righteously, with a literate mouth. And only the true Tailorist understands that. It’s gotta be female circumcision, curtailment, literacy, Prophetic curtailment of the Feminine Phallus: for Word to be Bond, it’s got to be that.

The difficulty of a Prophetess and my reading of circumcision is a solution to the problem of how the Feminine archetype can be phallic, how Divine cosmology might even be Truthfully received. The difficult topic of female circumcision is, in fact, the impossible reality of our inceptive receptivity.

Oh well. What’s it mean for the religious practice of “physical” circumcision? Absolutely nothing. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t wish it on my children (boys or girls), but that’s more a case of familiarity and culture. Cue the obvious postcolonial critique of how this discussion can be usurped to wage violence against Muslims (Ayan van de Hirsi anyone?) Not to mention the (pretty benign) Australian mythic intermingling of the Indonesian menace/genital mutilation: surely a great PhD thesis in there somewhere. But I’m yawning even recalling. I didn’t get the cut myself, so what do I know.

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We make our pilgrimage to/through/by means of a structure known as the Cube.

It comprises of the following aspects.

Six sides:

A dialectic of Martyrdom (submission/slavery, oblivion/fana) and Victory (messaging, hearing, rebooting/baqa). These correspond to the down and up of the Cube, respectively.

A bidirectional (copredicative) movement out of Love (unity) into Logic (shariah/law/differentiation) and from Logic into Love. This movement is the cycle of existence itself: out of God’s Love into a Journey through differential life (through culture, context, regimes of signs) back to Love (through reading/proving/mastering/understanding the signs of Logic). These correspond to the Northern and Southern faces of the Cube, respectively. We note that the Cube itself originates within the City of Love, while its pilgrimage of reading through its manifest representation and mastery (hinted at here) begins with a flight from that City of Love into the City of Logic. The Cube predicates upon its own situated geography in this way.

The Eastern and Western faces of the Cube correspond to Prophecy (the Light/Nur of Revelation) and the Channels of its embedding. These Western Channels are necessary for the Cube to manifest itself with Faces. The Channels allow Revelation to “stick” to matter at the subatomic level (an appropriate metaphor might be the strong nuclear force) — it is Light’s subatomically “sticky”, binding ability, such that when Light is extracted from matter, Revelation is read with nuclear impact, brighter than a thousand suns. You could equivalently think of the Channels as the “backness” of signs, their transmissive, predicative capability: the means by which one sign can be attached to another. Again, in this way, without Channels, there would be no Creativity to reflect the Husband of Prophecy.

The Cube’s secret (sirr) is hidden from view, inside. The doors of access are granted (descend/emerge) by engaging fully with the six faces, running through the permutations and combinations of their interrelationships. Inside the Cube is the Reason Why “Goddess” Is Not In the Vocabulary of the Tailorite. (But also why Prophetesses are always embedded as viral codes within the operating system of a Caliph’s Husk.)

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(Postcolonial Theoretic) Question: Why are we still dependent on theories developed in the West, as in by White Europeans?

We’ve already provided the answer to that question, in both long and short forms. In the former relation, as a bonus, we revealed who Hajar actually is (and why she’s intrinsic to all postcolonial escape, so much more than, say Said or Asad) and precisely how her circuit allows us to Face God.

But here’s the executive summary. Edward Said got it wrong, while (Wallice Fard) Muhammed got it right. The Orient is not a means to power for Western Imperialism. Western Imperialism is an invention of the Orient.

All it takes is for a Caliph to imagine the European piracy for piracy to become the paradigm. And for the pirate paradigm will run on and on, up to and including those who attempt an escape maneuver.

Yes, there is hope for the poor embittered brown man. There’s hope, always, for everyone. The means to escape, as usual, is encoded within the bars of misprison: and requires a Muhammedean/Hajaric offense, not a Saidian defense. That is to say (and this is where the Nation of Islam failed to grasp Wallice Fard’s point, literalising but what’s new?), it requires the Eastern man to know himself, by looking into the eyes of (his own) fantasy of the Western man fantasizing/orientalising the Eastern man’s reflection/creation of the West (see the importance of the Gollum to Kabbalah).

Thinking in future terms, the Fulfillment of the Ottoman Empire’s an invisible, veiled Caliph, the entire Kingdom’s a Caliph, dependent on the visibility of the wife/slave Prophetess, from Sultanate to a Sultanate of Women, Roxelana bifurcating a multiplicity of Ukrainian mothers, dictating public policy for (exterior, non-metaphoric) the ummah from behind the intimate interiority of the harem.